Express Check Out

The Retail Industry and Consumer Behavior have undergone a dramatic transformation over the last decade. A Retail store wants to offer a plethora of products and a consumer wants a one-stop shop. This desire to sell more and attract more is causing large retailers to face a single common challenge of “Queuing”. The checkout counters at these stores habitually have growing queues of impatient and restless consumers.

I frequently find myself spending my valuable weekends getting restless at such a queue and have a dipolar dilemma of either persisting through the suffering or orphaning my shopping cart and storming out of the store.

My observations and my personal shopping experience is the origin of this idea. I term this innovation, the “Express Check-Out (ECO)”; a solution targeted at providing a self-service checkout counters eliminating the need to queue up.         

The ECO cart will be a smart shopping cart aimed at replacing the omnipresent dummy shopping cart. To visualize an ECO cart, think of the traditional shopping cart (with or without wheels) fitted with all of the following nifty gadgets:

• Sensitive weight sensors embedded in the base of the basket
• RFID tag scanners embedded in two opposite or four adjacent walls of the basket
• A “honesty” red/green glowing  LED for visual “honesty” confirmation
• An effortless billing interface capable of

• Reading barcode for billing the purchase items
• Changing the mode to add or delete the scanned items
• A swipe for credit, debit and loyalty card

As a prerequisite, the store will require to maintain a mapping of the item with its corresponding weight, if this information is not already available in the barcode.

The user experience can be workflow-ed as:

1. The customer wishes to purchase an item X
2. The user scans the barcode on the product and then places it in the basket
3. The total weight of all the scanned items should be equal to the actual weight in the basket. This will ensure the customer does not “accidentally” skip step 2
4. The honesty visual confirmation will further reinforce step 2 by glowing appropriately. This will be an indication for both the store managers and the customer.
5. Items with negligible weight will have RFID tag attached to them. The RFID tag will be read by the scanner in the wall of the basket and the item will be added to the shopping list automatically
6. Once done with the shopping, the consumer will have to wheel the cart through a content scanner. The scanner shall scan all the contents of the basket and compare it with the shopping list generated by the billing interface. The content scanner can highlight any ambiguity and the customer can be forwarded for manual inspection
7. If it’s a green from the honesty LED and the content scanner, the customer can simple swipe his card and check out

A customer has the opportunity to do all this with little or no queuing!

ECO creates value to all the stakeholders – for the customers it empowers them with an express checkout facility and for the retail store it will reduces the workload of the checkout counter personnel and provide a unique and a pleasant shopping experience.  

Personal Note:

I had conceived this idea in the month of September of 2008 and had it submitted to Eureka, an entrepreneur program organized by IIT Mumbai. However, it failed to create the intended waves.

Today, in May 2011, I read about “Ahold USA'sStop & Shop and Giant supermarkets” being ready to roll out a version of this idea across their stores in the US.

I am being honest when I say this – I did not steal this idea. I did not produce this entry after reading the press release. This is the second of my ideas to be commercially developed by another creative thinker. I do not wish to claim ownership of this idea but want to convey my creativity and innovativeness that I constantly harp upon in my thought factory. Call me Arrogant, but that is a fact.

If you have had, any such ideas write it up and you can be a guest blogger on my thought factory.

Project Sixth Sense

Watch the video before you commence reading this entry:

As I started watching this video, I had the following notion “what is this kid from some village in Gujarat with a stereotypical accent up to”? As the video progressed, this notion changed and I developed a deep sense of respect for him and his innovation.

He has made a commendable journey from a small town in Gujarat to the prestigious MIT via IIT. This kid is Pranav Mistry from Palanpur Gujarat and I truly appreciate his genius attempt at making this. He calls this project Sixth Sense and you can read a lot more on this on his website.

Some of these gestures can be handy while some of them do have their share of user-embedded challenges. A quick detour, user-embedded challenges are those that have questions around usability. Typically, you would want to ask, “Will a user be able to adopt this new way of using technology”?

The most imperative user embedded challenge is of having to carry a camera around your neck. Not everyone is going to be convinced and comfortable.

As a semi-professional photographer (semi-professional since the day I bought my Nikon D90) and being bashful of pointing my camera to everyday street objects, this will expedient my embarrassment by allowing me to speedily position my fingers and take a click. Like the audience, I too was swept by the idea and gave it an applause. However, what troubles me is will I have the quality as near as my DSLR? Will I be able to give the picture the right perspective? This style will best suit amateur of amateurs and my grandmother who will largely point straight and shoot.

At large airports in non-English speaking foreign worlds it will be convenient to place the boarding card on a screen that will direct you to the boarding gate. But where will a stapler and scissor (if you manage to carry them through the security check), sunglasses and keys take you? I am guessing the bottle of Tabasco sauce and the coffee mug will take you to some eatery around the corner but where am I to get a bottle of Tabasco sauce and a mug of coffee? Who carries a bottle of sauce or a mug when travelling?

When I am running low on reading material, I will often prepare a list after browsing through book rating and review websites. Then, invariably I will forget to carry the list or if I am carrying the list, my local bookstore will not have a copy. This leaves me alone to make the buy decision. The thought of having this concept show me the book reviews as I browse the store is intriguing. This can be easily extended to movies at theatres or to as you walk through a library or store.

I am not being critical of the concept; I really admire Pranav’s vision and his motive. It is a rave of an idea and it deserves all the duly awarded accolades. The concept is there, he was able to put together a prototype and demonstrate it, but it is not really out there. I hear he is running behind schedule but it is just a matter of time. For all you know, the delay could be attributed to the fact that he is working to overcoming some of the embedment challenges.

What is your judgment on Pranav’s Sixth Sense project?

PS: A viewer on You Tube had an interesting comment to make. The movie Sixth Sense and the Gestural concept Sixth Sense were both very creative and were both conceived by Indians – Night Shyamalan and Pranav Mistry. This is something to cheer about.